A New Book by Eileen Myles

Since her visit in 2010 for the launch of her novel Inferno, the staff here has been smitten by Eileen Myles. She is a captivating, smart and fearless voice, and writer Denis Cooper adds a bunch more adjectives to the list: "honest, jokey, paranoid, sentimental, mean, lyrical, tough, you name it."

Her new collection of poetry, Snowflake / different streets is a two-in-one-kind-of-a-deal: Snowflake collects new poems, while different streets collects "newer" poems.

Myles is not afraid of life, and her writing transmits just that, life and will on the road, in lonesome reflections, in bed, everywhere, basically. The poems in these two books are noticeably tall, from far they can look like shopping lists. I'm sure even her shopping lists deserve a book. Here's an excerpt:

Eileen

yes Ernie

why can you

have junk

food & I 

cannot. Why can 

you have a

giant plate

of pasta 

and I can 

no longer have 

my crunchy
treats Why 

am I served 

up a cold

fish plate. 

you're not 

so thin 

Eileen

I know.

We're always stocking as much of her books as possible, that includes Cool for You (I die for this cover), The Importance of Being Iceland, Not Me and the excellent anthology The New Fuck You, which she co-edited.